Month: July 2012

Amid the fracking madness last week, state legislators passed three terrible bills – House Bill 819 (H8191), Senate Bill 229 (S2292), and House Bill 953 (H9533) – and we need your help to urge Governor Perdue to veto all three. Email her today: http://action.ncconservationnetwork.org/VetoThreeBills

H819 requires that for the next four years North Carolina ignore scientific predictions of a rapid rise in sea level. Some legislators clearly hope to instead adopt the pseudo-science of special interest groups and climate change deniers. Perhaps even more concerning are S229 and H953. S229 is a bill chock full of loopholes and rollbacks for polluters, while H953 delays cleanup of pollution in the Jordan Lake watershed.

Some state legislators have shown us clearly that they’d rather listen to special interest groups than scientists and health experts. Representative Deborah Ross summed up H819, which has been ridiculed across the nation:

“This bill is basically like saying to your doctor, ‘Don’t do any tests on me, and if you do any tests and find something wrong, don’t tell me for four years,'” state Representative Deborah Ross, a Democrat, said. “By putting our heads in the sand literally, we are not helping property owners. We are hurting them. We are not giving them information they might need to protect their property. Ignorance is not bliss. It’s dangerous.”4

S229 is a laundry list of exemptions for polluters including: weakening NC’s strong water basin quality program; exemptions for compost facilities from stormwater rules; and ambiguous language limiting local control over buffers that protect clean water. H953 has a number of bad environmental proposals, most notable a two year delay in pollution controls for new development in the Jordan Lake watershed. Tell Governor Perdue to veto these 3 bills and put North Carolina back on the right track.

Have you ever attended a City of Charlotte Economic Development Council Committee meeting? If not, why don’t you make plans to check it out. The Committee will meet July 19, 2012 at 3:00pm in Room CH-14 of the Government Center.

This months meeting will include a report by the CMUD Advisory Committee. The agenda and additional information can be found below

You’re Invited: Stop the Frack Attack Rally

On Saturday, July 28th, the Sierra Club is joining with dozens of other organizations in coalition to Stop the Frack Attack. Thousands of people will rally in Washington, D.C. to move our country towards a more sustainable future where drilling for natural gas does not threaten our air and water. Like you, these people have sent messages to President Obama, Congress, and the EPA about their fracking concerns. This time, we want to do it in person.

There is a rush to frack in states across the country, yet the natural gas industry continues to be exempt from important public health protections such as the Safe Drinking Water Act. We need to join together to close these destructive loopholes.

On Saturday, July 28th, the Sierra Club is joining with dozens of other organizations in a coalition to Stop the Frack Attack. Thousands of people will rally in Washington, D.C. to move our country towards a more sustainable future where drilling for natural gas does not threaten our air and water.

Join us in Washington D.C. on July 28th — we need you to speak out against the dangers of fracking.

Event Details
WHO: You and others who are concerned about the impact of fracking in our communitiesWHAT: Stop the Frack Attack RallyWHEN: Saturday, July 28th, Rally begins at 2 p.m., March begins at 3:30 p.m.WHERE: West Lawn of the Capitol, Washington, D.C. (map)

The Sierra Club would like to invite some of you to attend an important community wide event on sustainability as our guest. The first 15 people to join or renew (http://action.sierraclub.org/site/PageServer?pagename=Main_Join_or_Give) will get a free ticket to a great event! The Sierra Club, Sustain Charlotte, and PiES will be hosting an exclusive Charlotte showing of Fixing the Futureon July 18th at the Epicenter Theater. Starting at 6:00 pm will have a pre-viewing networking social get together in the theater lounge and the film starts at 7:30 (tickets required).

It’s going to be an enlightening and thought provoking film. By featuring communities using sustainable and innovative approaches to create jobs and build prosperity, Fixing the Future inspires hope and renewal in a people overwhelmed by economic collapse. The film highlights effective, local practices such as: local business alliances, community banking, time banking/hour exchange, worker cooperatives and local currencies.

Once you go online and join or renew, email our Membership Chair, Christine Lisiewski <zurizoomstick@yahoo.com>, and reserve your ticket. We’ll have it available in the lobby lounge the night of the event.

Can’t make the event? The 16th person? Now would be a great time to join or renew. When you join online today, as a special thank you, Sierra Club will send you a free backpack as well as these exciting Member-only benefits:

One-year subscription to Sierra magazine

Worldwide Members-only outdoor trips

Automatic membership in your local Sierra Club Chapter

Discounts on Sierra Club calendars, books, and other merchandise

Thanks for your support of the Sierra Club.

P.S. Make plans to attend this special showing. Order your tickets. It will be a lot of fun!

Do you go nuclear over nukes? Then this is a meeting you should plan to attend!

Note: The original title of this post suggested that this was a Sierra Club event. While many Sierra Club nuclear activist will be attending, the program is being developed by C.A.N., the Coalition Against Nukes.

It’ll be an inspiring three days of rallies, panels, Congressional briefings, educational and social events and networking. Sierra Club activists won’t want to miss out on these important three days!

According to the C.A.N. website, the three-day grand event is meant to:
1. focus attention on the medical effects of radiation exposure.
2. call for an immediate phase out of nuclear power in the United States beginning with our Mark 1 and Mark 2 boiling water reactors and any reactors with serious glaring concerns or located in a seismic/tsunami prone area; and
3. heighten the focus on the continuing catastrophe in Fukushima, Japan and especially in regards to irradiated fuel pool in the number 4 Reactor which will hopefully still be intact by September.

As you know, the Club has many long-standing policies that oppose nuclear power and describe how nuclear power is not an energy source to be encouraged, that reactor licenses should not be renewed, oppose loan guarantees, and urge repeal of Price-Anderson liability limitation.

Sarah Hodgdon, the Club’s Director of Conservation, talks about the Club’s dedication to a nuclear-free energy future in this June 2012 blog in Treehugger.

As a grassroots organization, it is important for Club Chapters to urge closure of particular existing reactors based on local circumstances and to alert their friends and neighbors of the dangers of continued operation of a reactor. Fighting nuclear power generation is still a case by case fight that must involve folks immediately affected. We believe this grassroots campaign organizing should be energized by the lessons of the Fukushima disaster which is still unfolding.

The Club formally endorses the hardened, on-site storage (HOSS) principles. These principles urge that high-level radioactive waste, as soon as possible, be stored in hardened dry storage and moved to a less dangerous place as near as safely possible to the site of generation, in order to distance it from bodies of water, fault lines and storms. Fuel pool number 4 at Fukushima has shown that the indifference of reactor operators and regulators to the dangers of overcrowded pools must be addressed immediately.

There’s a lot of work the Club can do right now, and our volunteers are spending a prodigious amount of time and expertise working toward an energy future free of nuclear power and its deadly legacy.

The No Nukes Team supports the C.A.N. event as a good ally working in the same direction, but we are cautious about expressing a formal position on the categorical closure of reactors without understanding and planning for the consequences of doing that. We urge the immediate formation of a timeline of an energy replacement plan that relies on efficiency and clean renewable energy, so that no new nuclear power is developed and the dirtiest and most dangerous nuclear power plants are promptly retired. Instead of nuclear, resources should be spent on invested in efficiency and clean replacement power.

Here’s looking forward to a great 3-days in DC, zeroing in on the nuclear-free future that we are all passionate about.

Charlotte Mecklenburg has already had multiple Code Orange days for ozone pollution and Code Yellow days for particulate pollution. Please take action to protect the air of our community, our state and our nation. You’ll breathe a little easier…

What would you do if your friend or family member was struggling to breathe? The first time it happened to my brother, Toby, I was scared. It turns out he was having a severe asthma attack and had to be hospitalized.

After that, my family’s view of summer changed forever. I had always thought of summer as the time when kids explored the great outdoors, but for my brother and the 17 million other Americans with asthma, summer can be dangerous. Heat mixed with pollution, like soot, can make it life-threatening for them to breathe outdoors.1

I was thrilled when the EPA issued a new clean air safeguard to protect Americans from dangerous soot pollution. It has the potential to save thousands of lives but big polluters are fighting to stop it.

Soot, much of which comes from coal-fired power plants, is one of the most dangerous forms of air pollution. It contributes to heart disease, asthma, and premature deaths — adding up to $1 billion a year in health care costs!2

To me, it’s unbelievable that anyone could oppose the EPA’s measure to protect public health from pollutants as toxic as soot. But Big Polluters like the American Petroleum Institute are doing whatever they can to stop the EPA. They are more concerned about protecting their profits than protecting public health.3

Eventually, pollution made Toby’s asthma so bad that we had to move away from Boston to protect his health. We finally settled in Maine, but every summer we still had to check to make sure there were no air quality alerts before we went outside. To this day I still check them.

Not every family is able to move away from the dirty air in their community. The new EPA standard is our chance to ensure that no one dies because they live in a community with a soot pollution problem.